Something I’m often asked to explain to those interested in blogging or maintaining a blog is “what is RSS”?

If you’re using Internet Explorer or Firefox you will notice in the address bar of this blog that there is an orange RSS icon to the right of the address bar. On many a blog or news website you will find the universal orange-coloured RSS icon, indicating that there is a content feed that you can ’subscribe’ to. This feed provides a URL or address you can enter into your web browser, email browser, RSS reader or mobile phone to recieve the latest updates from that site without having to visit the site again.

See this video…

RSS itself stands for Really Simply Syndication, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.
And RSS feed contains certain information on a news post such as

• The title of the post
• A link to the original article
• The actual post content
• Publishing date
• Authors name

This information is gathered from the feed and presented in a readable formatin a feed reader or aggregator e.g. Google Reader.

Every time the original blog or news site updates, you can use your chosen feed reader to see those latest updates (this is usually automatic) without having to visit the site again. For you, subscribing to RSS feeds means that you could track 5, 10, 50, 100 blogs or news sites all from the one application (again, like Google Reader).

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